"A work of art is as a stone dropped into that pool of feelings which inhabit us all."

Show extended through March!

Ken Schiano will be the featured artist for the February First Friday exhibition at MASSONIART. Schiano is a recent transplant to the Chestertown area. Nearly two years ago he moved from Bangor, Maine to the Eastern Shore with his wife, architect Paula Beall. Schiano’s award winning work has been exhibited widely up and down the East Coast and is in numerous corporate and private collections.

Although he is relatively new to the area, he has been exhibiting with the Carla Massoni Gallery since 1995. Schiano is known for his luminous multi-layered pastel abstractions. In 2013 he began experimenting with new mediums and larger scale. All new work will be featured in this show – but the result is pure Schiano.

An architect by training, he received his Bachelor of Architecture from Cooper Union. While there Schiano was exposed to the power of color by Op-Art painter, Ben Cunningham, and later by contemporary artist Wolf Kahn. He taught both art and architecture at the University of Kentucky and the Illinois Institute of Technology and was a partner at QA13 Architects for 25 years.

“My skills as an artist are still largely self-taught,” Schiano commented. “I tend to rely heavily on architectonic principles, especially in the honest use of materials and process. My work is uncompromisingly abstract, and despite external sources, my subject matter is derived solely from the act of painting. I mix my own colors and make the pigment tools I use, matching them to the shape and strength of my hand. In the process I hope my activities would also begin to suggest where the bounds between discipline and surrender lie.”

The front gallery at MASSONIART will be dedicated to Schiano’s new body of
work that he titled The Secret Splendor of Sincerity. “By definition sincerity is the quality of being free from pretense, deceit, or hypocrisy and when artists achieve it,” gallery owner Carla Massoni reminds us, “the results are splendid indeed.”
Also featured during the month of February will be artists: Larry Schroth, Karen Hubacher, Michael Kahn, Celia Pearson and Joe Karlik.